Talk:Teradata

Remark

Please keep to information that is understandable by common readers. Do not use ambiguous in-house definitions of general terms like data warehouse -- this is generally denoted as an application of a DBMS, whereas someone editing this page used it in the sense of a DBMS.

What is shared nothing architecture? Define it or I will remove the sentence.

-- Nixdorf

Wal-Mart?

Actually, Wal-Mart was not Teradata's first customer. Wal-Mart bought its first Teradata system in 1989, by which time Teradata was already being used by more than 100 enterprises.

K-Mart and AT&T were among the early adopters.

Lot of companies now using Teradata for Active data warehousing.

Folks, Remove Unica from the teradata link, as it is misleading.

Customers

Teradata has many customers; however, it isn't necessary to add all of them to this article. Eight well known customers plus the Wal-Mart mention is enough. Stephenpace 22:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

As suggested, I've cut back the "other customers" listed to eight, and left the preceding Wal-Mart mention. Crysb (talk) 13:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

SAP Partnership

To be clear on this partnership, at the time the agreement was announced it essentially allowed SAP BW customers to load data from Teradata sources, but did not allow data from SAP BW to flow back to Teradata. Stephenpace 16:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC) This is clearly not true. To allow users to access the data in a more timely fashion, Teradata can be used (in conjunction with Oracle) as the DBMS for SAP BW, while SAP Open Hub Data Extract from SAP BW to Teradata allows data to flow from SAP BW into Teradata. --Jeffpankow 16:31, 30 March 2007 (UTC) You are probably much more up on this than me, so I amended my text to reflect that at the time of the announcement, it was essentially a one-way agreement. No doubt things have moved on a bit. One thing I would say is that from an outsider point of view, SAP appeared to get a lot more out of this than Teradata did. Anything short of a native port of SAP BW to Teradata (not a kludge of having to go through a non-Teradata RDBMS like Oracle) seems like a net loss for Teradata, especially since SAP is beginning to shift focus to their own BI appliance to address performance issues in another way. Also, when BW first arrived on the scene, I heard that some SAP customers were prevented by contract from wholesale moving SAP BW data to other platforms, although I've also heard some customers pushed back on that requirement so it may not be as much of an issue anymore, especially if products like SAP Open Hub Data Extract now exist and work as designed. Even then, though, having and moving data around between multiple data warehouses seems to defeat the purpose somewhat of having 'one version of the truth'. I'd rather have one Teradata warehouse (or if forced to, one SAP BW) so I didn't have to maintain two copies. Stephenpace 17:28, 30 March 2007 (UTC) As I see it, the idea of the SAP product (and Teradata for that matter) is to deliver value to the end user. It may be a bit of a kludge, but this is a way to augment a base architecture that cannot handle the desired workload. The majority of SAP customers do not require the additional power, and it is probably easier and more adventageous to SAP to divert work than it is to modify their base architecture.--Jeffpankow 21:32, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Competition

Teradata has competition on a number of fronts, and this section needs expanding. While they pioneered this market, Teradata's historically high pricing opened the door for smaller data warehouse appliance vendors like Netezza, DATAllegro, and Calpont. On the packaged data warehouse front, software products like SAP BW and Kalido have won business and have been a primary blocker for Teradata moving into the energy vertical. And their primary competition is still custom built warehousing using other high-end database technology from IBM and Oracle. Please do not remove any one of these three areas without further discussion. Thanks. Stephenpace 16:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC) Teradata does have competition on a variety of fronts. Some of this is due to the data warehouse expansion into businesses that would not have dreamed there to be a need just a few years ago. It also has to do with Teradata being in the business of more than just Enterprise Data Warehousing (CRM and DCM in particular). My removal of SAP and Kalido previously was rooted in the fact that I have seen this particular section used as a way for companies (that had apsirations to compete in the EDW space) promote their product (aka advertising). Being that I do not believe that these two products (or Calpont) are actually competing in the same space that Teradata actually competes in, I felt it was prudent for me to delete them from the section. People traditionally buy SAP for reasons other than their BW (thus I do not see it as competition), and Kalido is a company I have never heard of (as is also the case with Calpont). Being in Houston, you probably see more of the energy sector than I do (I have traditionally operated in the retail and travel sectors) so I will give you the benefit of the doubt. --Jeffpankow 21:53, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

No need to list every data appliance vendor. Netezza and DataAllegro are the most prominent. Greenplum seems to have some endorsement by Sun and PANTA seems to have some endorsement by Oracle, but neither seems to have made a market impact yet. Removed for now. Stephenpace 12:15, 5 July 2007 (UTC) I reverted the appliance vendor section again. How many is the correct number? I don't know, but I think a good indicator is revenue by product line. Any vendor with revenue under $10 million per year is hardly competition for Teradata, IMHO. I would think that HP Neoview is likely to be a viable competitor in the future especially given their backing, but to date I haven't seen much about their customer successes yet. Stephenpace 01:30, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm removing the reference to slow penetration in energy vertical, absent any reference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.156.14.81 (talk) 13:16, 18 January 2009 (UTC) How about the Teradata customer page for reference: http://www.teradata.com/t/customers-industry/ . Split by vertical, energy (as of today) still isn't one which makes sense given they have few to no customers there. By contrast, energy is a huge vertical for SAP and almost every major oil company has SAP BW for at least operational reporting. Stephenpace (talk) 20:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Advertising

This page reads like an advert. Tagging advertising. Saganaki- 04:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

No more so than similar pages on IBM and Oracle, and they aren't tagged. Duncan 17:02, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to tag other articles you feel don't meet article standards. Stephenpace 22:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The Significant features list seems a bit un-encyclopedic at best, in particular "Parallel efficiency, such that the effort for creating 100 records is same as that for creating 100,000 records." what is "effort"? this doesn't seem to match with parallelism efficiency 203.35.135.133 (talk) 01:44, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Parts of "Recognition" seem to have an NPOV issue. The Gartner Group is and has always been closely associated with the NCR corporation, and hence, the Teradata product. Now I am not suggesting in the slightest anything illegal, immoral, underhanded or unethical. Not at all. I am not familiar at all with how Wikipedia handles such issues so I will simply raise the issue and leave it at that. Old_Wombat (talk) 08:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

How come no information on AT&Ts ownership?

The original AT&T owned NCR for a few disatrous years and I understand the whole Teradata product line was almost killed off. It is my understanding that it wasn't until NCR itself was spun off and needed something to sell that Teradata as a product actually took off. I don't have enough detailed understanding to make changes to the entry as such. But it is quite a story! surely someone with some detailed knowledge could add something.

Need more on their DBMS

Is their DBMS proprietary or is it add-ons atop another DBMS? Is it relational? Is it ANSI SQL compliant? Does it come with procedural language interface, etc.

cheers,

70.153.8.204 (talk) 12:05, 11 December 2007 (UTC)H. Hall

Teradata has their own relational database (e.g. it is not Oracle or DB2 under the covers). Regarding ANSI SQL compliance, from what I understand, Teradata implements a very large subset of the SQL 2003 core language standard, similar to other database vendors. Stephenpace (talk) 18:59, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

As a former NCR/Teradata emplopyee and support person, I can add this. The DBMS is proprietary, as is sort of implied by the first sentence of the second paragraph.

By design, the DBMS is optimised for data retrieval. This is why it was specifically targetted as a data warehouse product, not an OLTP. The optimum environment from a sales point of view was where large data would be loaded into a table, once, and never modified, only retrieved. The Walmart environment is a perfect example of this: at the end of each day, details of every item sold that day at every Walmart store would be entered into a table. Obviously, that data would never be changed, but used for myriad forms of later sales analyses.

The Teradata corporation traditionally used Oracle for performance comparison. For large database tables, the retrieval was faster than for Oracle; and the bigger the database, the bigger the performance difference. That was its main selling point. At the time :D — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.166.78.97 (talk) 06:46, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Articles on individual utilities?

The section "Teradata Utilities" is basically a list of articles on the individual utilities. Are these utilities significant/notable in and of themselves? if so, are there better sources that describe/evaluate them? Right now the articles seem to have been copied nearly verbatim from Teradata's own marketing information. If not, is there any reason for keeping the articles on the utilities? (Asking this here in hopes of finding more expert opinions.) - Jaeger5432 | Talk 21:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

History

I believe the list of Teradata founders is incorrect. Unfortunately, I don't see any cites for the list currently in the article so I don't know where it came from. Many sites include, verbatim, the same list -- but they may have drawn from this article.

As I recall, Carroll Reed joined the company as VP of R&D in 1982, well after the company was founded in 1979. Reed replaced Neches who had been in that role (Neches remained with the company but I don't recall what his new title became). Teradata's first annual report (1987) lists all the employees (possibly including contractors also) as of that time by order of hire and Reed's name appears well down in the list (in the #40 to #50 range).

I don't recall ever hearing that Reed was a founder in the formal sense, although it's possible that he was (such as, for example, by providing personal funding while he was still at TTI/Citicorp) and this was not widely known within the rank and file employees at Teradata.

Carroll's obituary (http://www.zirana.com/bakersfield/obituaries/obituary_robert_reed_1934_2009.html) indicates that he was "one of the original founders of Teradata Corporation", but I don't take that a definitive statement in the context that "founder" is meant in the context of this Wikipedia article.

Carroll was certainly at the company during its formative years and had a key role in its success from before first product launch through after IPO.

Unfortunately, I'm not certain enough to update the article unless/until I can find a reputable source that supports my recollection (unfortunately, this history predates the web).

WorthWhatPaid (talk) 01:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Going to try to fix this page

I'm fairly new to Wikipedia, but I'm going to try making this page better by adding citations and more referenced information. Please let me know if I do something incorrect. ElaineJS (talk) 15:49, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Can flags be removed?

I took out a lot of information that may have been perceived as biased or not notable, including a lot of stuff that was cited with only the company website. Can the flags be removed? ElaineJS (talk) 16:05, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

I have a question here too. I went through and tried to take out the remaining biased info, but I have a question on the sources: If the company website is used as a citation for the history, is that a problem? Does the history here need to be removed? Most of the sources appear to be third party. HtownCat (talk) 21:51, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

No one has answered, so I'm taking the remaining flag down. ElaineJS (talk) 01:22, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Inline link

Added inline link to Wikipedia article on Gartner, as most people who are not in information technology might not have enough knowledge about this firm. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ajyaev (talk • contribs) 09:50, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

2016 Update

I am going to take a thorough review of this article and remove the flags when I am done. If anybody wants to suggest the flags should go back in, please do. But there flags and others have been up here since 2012, so it seems long, long overdue to revise them. (Or, better yet, please just improve the article to the point where you feel you can remove the flags.

Mcenedella (talk)(contribs) 22:19, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

OK, I spent an hour on this page and managed to greatly improve the lead paragraphs and the infobox. I'm disappointed at how little I could dig in to the actual content in the article to improve it, and ended up just deleting the most egregious marketing speak from the article in order to justify the removal of the tags. Mcenedella (talk)(contribs) 23:06, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Request to add logo and remove select content

For Teradata, I am submitting a request proposing three (hopefully) uncontroversial changes:

1. add the company's logo to the infobox (File:Teradata Logo.png), which seems standard for company articles
2. remove the 5 subheadings under "Technology and products": ("Active enterprise data warehouse", "Aster Platform", "Backup, archive, and restore", "QueryGrid", and "Platform family"), since most of these include just a couple sentences.
3. remove inline references linking to the company's website and the content supported by them, which I'm bulleting out below:

In the third request, to better follow Wikipedia's guidelines about appropriate references, I suggest removing the following references and content from under the "Technology and products" heading:

• remove reference #55 (after "Teradata Integrated Analytics"), which links to Teradata's website
• remove "The Aster Platform is Teradata's analytic technology, acquired from Aster Data Systems" and its reference (company website)
• remove "BAR is Teradata's backup and recovery system" and its reference (company website)
• remove the entire paragraph: "The Teradata database includes a feature called QueryGrid, that allows user of the Teradata database to fetch data from external databases from standard SQL queries, as if they were hosted in the local EDW. The data movement happens in parallel whenever possible, so it is as efficient as performance the external data source; this is usually still much slower than native Teradata database performance, but still acceptable for exploratory tasks. External data sources are Aster, Presto, Teradata, Hive and Oracle." This paragraph mostly has no references, and the reference after "The Teradata database includes a feature called QueryGrid" links to the company's website.

I took the current code for the whole section and made three changes: 1) removed headings, 2) removed a couple line breaks to improve flow, and 3) removed the content and references mentioned above. No other changes have been made to the markup. Here is the updated code that can be used if appropriate:

Updated code for "Technology and products" section

{{see also|Teradata Geospatial|Teradata Warehouse Miner|Teradata Parallel Transporter}} Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, often called Teradata Database, includes data management tools and [[data mining]] software. Teradata's product can be used for [[business analysis]]. Data warehouses can track company data, such as sales, customer preferences, product placement, etc.<ref name="Lawson"/> The data warehouse differentiates between "hot and cold" data{{snd}} meaning that the warehouse puts data that is not often used in a slower storage section.<ref>{{cite web|last=Whitehorn|first=Mark|title=What your database needs is a good thermometer.|url=https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/14/hot_and_cold_data/|date=September 14, 2009|work=The Register|accessdate=December 13, 2011}}</ref> The original system used a proprietary network technology called BYNet.<ref>{{Cite news |title= Teradata scales a data mountain |work= Info World |author= Allan Holbrook |date= February 14, 2000 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=azkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81 |access-date= March 30, 2017 }}</ref> Teradata Database 13.10 was announced in October 2010.<ref>Dignan, Larry. “Teradata rolls out latest database, pushes time aware analysis.” ZDnet. October 25, 2010. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/teradata-rolls-out-latest-database-pushes-time-aware-analysis/40865</ref><ref>Vizard, Mike. [http://www.ctoedge.com/content/teradata-extends-analytics-engine “Teradata Extends Analytics Engine.”] CTOEdge. October 25, 2010.</ref> At the time, Teradata used Xeon 5600 processors for the server nodes.<ref>{{cite web|last=Morgan|first=Timothy Prickett|title=Teradata pumps data warehouses with six-core Xeons|url=https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/25/teradata_appliance_refresh/|date=October 25, 2010|work=The Register|accessdate=December 13, 2011}}</ref> Teradata Database 14 was sold as the upgrade to 13.10 in 2011 and runs multiple data warehouse workloads at the same time.<ref>Russom, Philip. [http://tdwi.org/blogs/philip-russom/2011/09/big-data-analytics-news-from-teradata.aspx “Big Data Analytics: The News from Teradata.”] TDWI blog. September 22, 2011.</ref> It includes column-store analyses.<ref>Henschen, Doug. [http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/231601992?pgno=1 “Teradata Upgrades Break Down Database Barriers.”] ''InformationWeek''. September 22, 2011.</ref> Teradata Integrated Analytics is a set of tools for data analysis that resides inside the data warehouse.<ref>Winter, Richard. InformationWeek. September 18, 2010. [http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/info_management/227500132 “Research: State of Enterprise Databases.”]</ref> Teradata Warehouse Miner provides and interface for [[data mining]] on [[Microsoft Windows]]. It was released before 2003.<ref>{{Cite book |page= 247-248 |title= Investigative Data Mining for Security and Criminal Detection |author= Jesus Mena |publisher= Butterworth-Heinemann |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=WbSNpYHoNWMC&pg=PA24 |isbn= 9780750676137 }}</ref> The Teradata Disaster Recovery Solution is automation and tools for data recovery and archiving. Customer data can be stored in an offsite recovery center.<ref>Fratto, Mike. [http://www.networkcomputing.com/backup-recovery/229503239?pgno=1 "Teradata Disaster Recovery Solution Helps Reduce the Panic of Catastrophic Events."] Network Computing. June 29, 2009.</ref> Teradata Platform Family is a set of products that include the Teradata Data Warehouse, Database, and a set of analytic tools. The platform family is marketed as smaller and less expensive than the other Teradata products.<ref>IT Reseller Magazine. [http://www.itrportal.com/absolutenm/templates/article-storage.aspx?articleid=4911&zoneid=21 "Teradata announces new family of powerful analytic platforms.."]{{dead link|date=September 2017}}</ref>

I will have additional requests for "Technology and products". For now I'm looking to clean the section up a bit and remove inappropriate content and references. As well as the changes for this section, what do editors think about removing the "Competition" section in its entirety. This section has only one reference following "Netezza", which links to this questionable site. Also, I don't see similar "Competition" sections in other company articles.

As a Teradata employee, tasked to improve this article, I will not edit directly and will try to follow all Wikipedia's guidelines for companies and conflicts of interest. I've had some help in putting together the code for this request and in gaining understanding of Wikipedia's rules, but I welcome any feedback. Thank you. Dodds_Writer (Talk · Disclosure: Employee of Teradata) 15:28, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Mcenedella: I noticed you made improvements to this article last year, and I'm curious if you'd be willing to take a look at this edit request, which suggests further improvements and updates. Thanks for considering, and please let me know if you have any questions. Dodds_Writer (Talk · Disclosure: Employee of Teradata) 20:40, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@Dodds Writer: Happy to review and do so Dodds_Writer Mcenedella (talk)(contribs)

@Mcenedella: Thank you for your help. I am marking this edit request as answered and will be posting another one soon. Dodds_Writer (Talk · Disclosure: Employee of Teradata) 19:11, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Request to update "Technology and products"

Following up on the first request I submitted above, here is another request for the "Technology and products" section. Again, I am employed by Teradata and this request is from the company.

First, I request addition of the following sentence to the start of the section: "Teradata offers three main solutions to its customers: cloud and hardware based data warehousing, business analytics, and ecosystem architecture consulting." This is verified by the company's SEC filing (Form 10-K), which says, "There are three key solutions in our portfolio which support our strategy and which drive consumption of Teradata database software: Hybrid Cloud Solutions, Business Analytics Solutions and Ecosystem Architecture Consulting", and this reference, which says, "For a long time, Teradata sold hardware boxes (integrated solution) to do data warehousing. Well, the hardware boxes are still around, but now Teradata is becoming more software defined and moving to the cloud. It's also offering business analytics services and ecosystem architecture consulting."

If these references are appropriate, here is the code to use:

• <ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/816761/000081676117000010/tdc-123116x10k.htm|title=Form 10-K: Teradata Corporation|date=December 31, 2016|publisher=[[U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission]]|accessdate=September 21, 2017}}</ref>
• <ref>{{Cite web|url=http://bwcio.businessworld.in/article/Teradata-puts-the-swagger-back-in-its-step/19-04-2017-116600/|title=Teradata puts the swagger back in its step|date=April 19, 2017|first=Brian|last=Pereira|website=BW CIO|accessdate=September 22, 2017}}</ref>

Next, I request addition of the following, per this reference and two ZDNet links (here and here): "In September 2016, the company launched Teradata Everywhere, which allows users to submit queries against public and private databases. The solution has a code base using massively parallel processing across both its physical data warehouse and cloud storage, including managed environments such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware, and Teradata's Managed Cloud and IntelliFlex." If these references are appropriate, here's the code:

• <ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/News-Flashes/Teradata-Targets-Hybrid-Cloud-Environments-with-Teradata-Everywhere-and-Borderless-Analytics-113475.aspx|title=Teradata Targets Hybrid Cloud Environments with Teradata Everywhere and Borderless Analytics|date=September 12, 2016|accessdate=September 22, 2017|website=Database Trends and Applications}}</ref>
• <ref>ZDNet: *{{Cite web|url=http://www.zdnet.com/article/teradata-expands-database-consolidates-analytics-across-clouds/|title=Teradata expands database, consolidates analytics across clouds|date=September 12, 2016|first=Natalie Gagliordi|website=[[ZDNet]]|publisher=[[CBS Interactive]]|accessdate=September 22, 2017}} *{{Cite web|url=http://www.zdnet.com/article/teradata-amps-up-cloud-and-consulting-offerings/|title=Teradata amps up cloud and consulting offerings|date=September 20, 2016|first=Doug|last=Henschen|website=ZDNet|accessdate=September 22, 2017}}</ref>

Thirdly, I request addition of the following content, per this reference: "Teradata offers customers both hybrid cloud (storing data across both public and private cloud platforms) and multi-cloud storage." If this reference is appropriate, here is the code:

• <ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.zdnet.com/article/teradata-attempts-disrupt-self-with-cloud-push/|title=Teradata attempts to disrupts itself with cloud push|first=Doug|last=Henschen|date=June 22, 2016|website=ZDNet|accessdate=September 22, 2017}}</ref>

Finally, one more requested addition, per this reference: "Teradata IntelliCloud is a secure managed cloud solution offering data and analytic software and data. IntelliCloud compatible with Teradata's data warehouse platform, IntelliFlex." If this is appropriate, here is the code for the reference:

• <ref>{{Cite journal|url=http://www.dqindia.com/Teradata-notes-that-in-briefings-customers-consistently-affirm-continuing-loyalty/|title=Teradata notes that in briefings, customers consistently affirm continuing loyalty|date=March 24, 2017|work=[[Dataquest]]|location=New Delhi|accessdate=September 22, 2017}}</ref>

Thank you for your review and any feedback. Dodds_Writer (Talk · Disclosure: Employee of Teradata) 19:16, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Dodds Writer: First of all, thanks for the detailed citations!

I've done my obligated checking that your articles appear to be neutral, and your text isn't copy-pasted from elsewhere. Thus, I've added your text with a few, what I believe to be minor modifications:

• I've elided the SEC filing citation, as it was presumably written by Teradata, and thus isn't a neutral third party.
• "Ecosystem architecture consulting" appears to be a Teradata-specific term, and my search for that exact term seemed to only have meaningful hits on Teradata's site. I've rephrased this as just "consulting services".
• I removed the parenthetical explaining what a hybrid cloud is, as the link was there anyway.
• I removed the existing (placeholder?) text and the gartner link, as I'm unsure if a reviews site counts as a credible/notable source for information?
• I can't parse "offering data and analytic software and data". Teradata's page reads "data and analytic software", but I'm still confused if that means "(data) and (analytic software)" or "(data and analytic) software". If you can offer a better phrasing, I'd appreciate it. I'll add the "as a service" in as well.
• I dropped the teradata-expands-database-consolidates-analytics-across-clouds citation, as there was another ZDnet article that covered the same material, but more comprehensively.
• I added an introductory clause for introducing IntelliCloud as well, to make the jump feel slightly less jolting.

Feel free to object to any of them.

I've intentionally not modified the review requested tag, because I'm not an experienced editor, so I'd personally appreciate if someone could double check that I've done wikipedia-compliant work. Linearizable (talk) 07:09, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

@Linearizable: Thanks for reviewing this request. I'll review your changes in more detail, but in the meantime, I seem to have forgotten the word "is" in the sentence "IntelliCloud compatible with Teradata's data warehouse platform, IntelliFlex." Do you mind changing this to "IntelliCloud is compatible with Teradata's data warehouse platform, IntelliFlex"? Thanks again for your help! Dodds_Writer (Talk · Disclosure: Employee of Teradata) 19:29, 18 October 2017 (UTC)